72 national geographic • May 2015
casinos opened in 1999 and 2000; they weren’t
the answer. Hosting the 2006 Super Bowl was
supposed to be a tipping point. It wasn’t.
The gusts that finally collapsed the sagging
city were the bankruptcy of General Motors and
Chrysler, and the foreclosure crisis that began in
2008. Abandoned houses and schools attracted
looters, drug dealers, and delinquents giddy for
fire. What had been a tidy quilt of neighbor-
hoods, with single-family homes and hardware
stores, finally fell into scraps.
Nobody is talking about rebuilding the
whole 139-square-mile city, huge enough to fit
Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco. But
it, four more homes, and four condos. “We’re
pretty tapped out now,” he says, “at $150,000.”
His $8,600 house had been abused: windows
and appliances missing, wiring and pipes ripped
out, oak floors sodden with trash and rotting
food. Having put about $15,000 into the house,
all that is behind him. He painted its plaster
walls a soothing pale denim. In the yard he built
raised beds and installed a beehive.
“I feel really good about this city,” he tells me
over green tea, a fire warming the living room.
“ The people here are the roots of its potential.”
What’s more, his mother will move into the house
next door. A flight attendant near retirement,
“You can’t save Detroit. You gotta be Detroit.”
—Antonio “Shades” Agee
like a fading migraine, the mood of the city has
lifted. In its mere solvency, Detroit feels flush.
At the far eastern edge of the city, Alex
Badasci Lindmeier, 36, owns his first home: a
90-year-old brick Tudor so near the river he can
hear the moaning horns of passing freighters.
Lindmeier and his girlfriend had almost
dropped $300,000 for a studio condo in her
hometown of Hong Kong, then realized, “We’d
spend all our money, and it wouldn’t bring us
anything new or exciting.” He designs websites;
she does online marketing. They can do their
jobs anywhere, so began to look all over: up and
down the West Coast, including his home state
of California, and even in Las Vegas.
In Vegas in July 2013, on the brink of making
a bid for a house, Lindmeier heard on his car
radio that Detroit had filed for bankruptcy. He
learned its old houses were being torn down.
Within days he packed a suitcase, an ice chest,
and his black lab mix, Maya, and drove across
the country. From a Motel 6 he made daily ex-
cursions into the unfamiliar landscape, living
off ham-and-cheese tortilla wraps.
One day he happened upon a block party in
the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood: people
of all shades savoring a barbecue. Within weeks
he started buying, and within a year, owned an
abandoned house on that block, the lot next to
she bought the last rough house on the block,
for $5,000. She’s eager for a grandbaby.
A few blocks from where Hatinger plants
seeds, Ruth Lowe can see the changes up close.
On her block, every house but hers is being
torn down or rehabbed. She might be 90, but
she knows the exact date she moved into the
sturdy brick duplex with her grandmother,
mother, husband, and two children: Novem-
ber 22, 1957.
We sit tight together in her foyer, where she
reads mail and watches TV. She apologizes for
the flowered scarf she hastily threw over her
hair after I knocked. When I ask how she feels
about Detroit these days, she stresses each word:
“I ... am ... overjoyed.” She jokes that her house,
the nicest on the block, might soon be the shab-
biest. “For too long,” she says, “nobody’s been
sitting out on their porches but me.”
Once, she knew the city intimately, waiting
tables at a black-owned hotel, and later selling
insurance. Lowe has stayed in this house, with
its oak trim and beveled glass, because it was
paid for long ago and holds her family’s history.
Now it shelters her unemployed grandson; one
daughter comes and goes. A few months ago
that daughter’s car and the replacement rental
were stolen from the curb out front.
“I tell my kids, Don’t let this house down